For my recent books, there have been third-party sellers that materialize almost instantly, before any of them could have possibly received a copy. They are pro

For my recent books, there have been third-party sellers that materialize almost instantly, before any of them could have possibly received a copy. They are probably using merchant-fulfillment, where the merchant holds the inventory and is responsible for shipping. Most of these are probably legit, because they can buy from a distributor on-demand (probably CreateSpace, i.e. Amazon, which is the same company that prints my book) and resell them. But there are dozens of sellers, so I have no idea which are legit. PDFs of my Kindle version have also shown up immediately on download sites. It would not be hard to make bootleg copies on-demand, list them, and ship them to customers. Not all Amazon customers use Prime, and may be willing to wait a week or two. To get Prime status, the sellers would have to use FBA and ship inventory to Amazon. Note that this is how every other product on Amazon works, and there have been plenty of complaints about counterfeit products: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/08/amazons-chinese-counterfeit-problem-is-getting-worse.html http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/08/amazons-chinese-counterfeit-p...